its built-in. scripts,cookies,flash,images,pop-ups all have built-in support to be blocked. you just turn them off and whenever a page blocks it, an icon will show up in the right end of the url bar. clicking that icon lets you manage the rights of that particular site.
I'm completely lost here. Are you saying this is built into Chrome without an extension? I've definitely never noticed anything like this. Got a post or link I can see somewhere?
Chrome -> Wrench menu ("Customize and control") -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Privacy -> Content Settings -> Plug-ins -> Disable individual plug-ins -> Disable Shockwave Flash.
If you're autoupdating Chrome, you have to get in a habit of checking the settings menu periodically for new stuff. Unlike the more mature FireFox settings menu, Chrome's is still getting additions.
Unless I'm missing something this isn't anywhere near the functionality of Flash Block. Flash Block puts a placeholder in the spot of any SWF file it would load, and then lets me click to load the file if I want to see it, or quickly whitelist the site if I always want it to be able to load flash.
This appears to be just be turning flash on or off globally (and not very quickly either). FF has that level of control out of the box as well.
If a site has one flash video I want to watch and a bunch a flash crap surrounding it that I don't want, it's nice to able to just unblock the video and not have to whitelist the entire site.
Something is wrong with your setup. I have been using that flash blocker for 2-3 months now and it blocks 100% flash objects for me both on mac and Windows, haven't tried it on Linux yet.
Well, I've tried it on Mac, Linux and Windows and it only blocks a minority of all flash files I've encountered. It seems especially bad with youtube and vimeo files embedded in blog posts.
In fact, I don't think it really can work in any real sense as an actual blocker since chrome doesn't provide an API for that. As I understand it, the best it can do is to remove the flash after the page has rendered.
But what you've said is true, FF's FlashBlock has much better control over Flash because of the control it has via the API. Chrome doesn't offer the same level of control to extensions, so they're all just going rewrite the page on load. That's been good enough for me though.
The point of Flashblock and NoScript is security without sacrificing usability on trusted sites. Yes, it lets you ignore the Flash, but it doesn't actually protect you because the Flash is still loaded.